PRIME TIME Fame and
fortune await the person who cracks the greatest problem in mathematics.
And that could be any day now, says Erica Klarroich

Hey, good lookin' BEAUTY can
win out over age.

When choosing sexual partners, men are more discerning than
they're given credit for, going for attractive older women over
younger women who would probably bear them more children.

"You'd think that men would always go for 20-yearolds,
but they don't,' says evolutionary psychologist George Fieldman
of Buckinghamshire Chiftems University College. 'Men prefer attractiveness
over youthfulness when selecting a long-term partner."

In most animal species, including humans, males are generally
thought to compete fbr as many partners as they can. Going for
quantity over quality increases their chances of having the maximum
number of offspring. But females are limited in the number cyf
children they can have, so they choose the best-quality mate possible.

Now Fieldman has shown that men choose too. The researchers
took a photo of a 36-year-old woman who was very attractive in
the eyes of a group of men. They showed the photo to three other
groups in their early 20s, along with photos of eight women aged
20 to 45 who'd been rated as less attractive. The researchers
told each group that the beautiful woman was either 36, 41 or
45 years old. When asked who they'd prefer as a long-term partner,
all three groups of men chose her, regardless of how old they
thought she was.

The finding shows that men are not purely concerned about the
number of offspring they might have, Fieldman says. They select
beautiful women because they think their children will do better
than the children of a younger but plainer woman. Joanna Marchant

IT SEEMS like a great idea: slow global warming by pumping
carbon dioxide to the bottom of the ocean, where it will remain
locked up for centuries. But a new model of the process and an
experiment to test the idea are stirring up debate about using
our oceans as a dumping ground for greenhouse gases.

Heige Drange and his colleagues from the Nansen Environmental
and Remote Sensing Centre in Bergen, Norway, used computer models
to show that CO, dumped at a depth of 800 metres in the Norwegian
Sea would dissolve before it bubbles to the surface. The heavier,
gas-rich water would then sink to the bottom, flow into the Atlantic
Ocean and not rise to the surface for centuries.

The idea is to extract CO, from waste gases, compress it to
liquefy it, and spray it into the deep water as small droplets
that can easily dissolve. "It's fairly simple," says
Drange. The estimated cost of disposing of C02 in this way would
be about $39 per tonne, compared with a tax of $32 per tonne

currently paid by offshore rigs in Norwegian waters for releasing
C02 into the air. While the researchers acknowledge that further
studies are needed, they think the plan could help to put a brake
on global warming. But environmentalists argue that polluting
the ocean to save the air will only create new problems and that
the long-term effects are unknown. Some worry that the acidity
of the C02-rich water will kill wildlife or dissolve parts of
the seabed, and that climate change may alter ocean circulation,
bringing the C02 back to the surface sooner than we now expect.
An international team hopes to answer some of these questions
by pumping a small amount Of C02 onto the seabed off Kona, Hawaii.
But the project faces serious opposition from the public and has
been scaled down several times already (New Scientist, 3 March,
p 7). Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu
expects it will be delayed until next year. "People are scared
because it's an unknown," he says.

The Hawaiian project currently proposes to dump less than 40
tonnes Of C02 into the water over 10 days. On that scale, few
people think the experiment will cause significant damage. But
Paul Johnston of the University of Exeter, who works for Greenpeace,
says that pursuing such projects may give people an excuse not
to reduce their emissions. "It's a totally irresponsible
way to convince people that there's a get-out-of-jail-free card.
There isn't." Johnston doubts that any amount of research
will ever prove the strategy safe. And, he estimates, the energy
used to get the CO, liquefied and down to the sea floor could
create about 40 per cent as much gas again. "You're going
to make the problem worse in the long term,' he says.

Drange admits the strategy faces problems. But, he says, "We
know the consequences of global warming. One should at least try
to assess the possibilities." Nicola Jones More at: Geophysical
Research Letters (vot 28, p 26371

IT'S A BURNOUT

Of the millions of eggs a woman is bom with, a mere few hundred
stand the slimmest chance of making a baby. The rest languish
in the ovaries getting steadily stale, or com.it suicide-mostly
before a woman reaches the grand old ge of forty. It makes for
some grim choices: either find a partner and establish your career
in double-quick time that you can have your babies young, or risk
leaving children until your eggs are no longer up to the job.

That, however, is all about to change. Fertility researchers
are powering ahead with their bid to rewind the hands of the dreaded
biological clock. That means girls being born today can probably
safely leave child rearing until their 40s, 50s or even 60s. But
while the coming revolution promises to be more liberating than
the contraceptive pill, paternity leave and emancipation combined,
it might just come with a nasty sting in its tail.

'The only thing in life that is so cataclysmic is this breeding
business. You have to cram it in by your late 30s," says
Alan Trounson, director of the Monash Institute for Reproduction
and Development in Melbourne. 'We'll find a way to stop menopause
being such a dramatic thing for women, but we have to make sure
we do it safely."

Make no mistake, doctors face immense challenges in trying
to understand the human egg-the key to delaying menopause. The
human egg is.impossible to grow for any length of time in a lab
dish, and while tucked away inside a woman's body, in its earliest
stages it is invisible even with the help of the most sophisticated
imaging equipment. Reproductive physiologists like to claim-with
some justification-that we know more about outer space than we
do about the inner workings of the human egg.

Even before a woman realises that she is pregnant, the cells
that will form her grandchildren have been carefully set aside
in her embryo, still less than the size of a rice grain. If the
fetus is female, by the seventh month of pregnancy, those cells
will have spawned a mind-boggling 7 million immature eggs.

From there on, though, it's all downhill. By the time a girl
is born, numbers have plummeted to about 2 million-a mass slaughter
whose purpose remains a mystery. Even then the carnage is far
from complete. Over the next five decades, the egg population
steadily diminishes as cells commit suicide in a series of defined
stepsa process called apoptosis.

Of course, a few eggs escape that fate. When the girl hits
puberty hormonal signals from the pituitary gland ensure that
every few weeks groups of eggs start to mature. Nourished by a
layer of granulosa cells, the chosen few take around six months
to balloon up to 60 times their original size. Eventually, one
egg outstrips the others, and ovulation occurs following another
hormonal surge from the pituitary gland. The egg escapes from
the ovary, and jets off into the fast lane of the Fallopian tube,
and the possibility of a brief encounter with a sperm.

That onerous selection process means that by the time a woman
has reached her late thirties, she's scraping the bottom of the
ovarian barrel. By 45, her chances of getting pregnant the old-fashioned
way "are very, very small," says Robert Winston, a leading
fertility expert at Imperial College, London. "Even by IVF,
it is only about 3 or 4 per cent."

According to current thinking those odds could be much improved
if reproductive physiologists could find some way to stop the
untimely deaths of immature eggs.

"My gut feeling is that menopause is determined by how
many of the resting follicles you have feeding the pipeline to
make more maturing follicles," says Jonathan Tilly, a reproductive
biologist at the Vincent Center for Reproductive Biology at Harvard.
Once that stockpile dries up, the pipeline shuts down, and the
woman's reproductive system throws in the sanitary towel.

One way to stop that happening is to put your eggs on ice until
you are ready to use them. Although human eggs are notoriously
sensitive to freezing and thawing, these techniques are slowly
edging into the mainstream-nowadays, clinics on at least three
continents offer egg freezing to young women, and up to 60 babies
worldwide have been born from frozen eggs.

Still, for now at least, the success rate remains low and none
of the clinics New Scientist contacted is prepared to guarantee
that its frozen eggs will be up to the job when they are defrosted.
But if the tech, niques continue to improve, it's likely that
babies born today won't bat an eyelid about freezing their eggs
while they build a career or search for Mr Right. "It's an
insurance policy," says Mohammed Taranissi, medical director
of the Assisted Reproduction and

Gyiiaecological Centre in London.

But it's a costly and inconvenient one. The eggs can only be
removed under sedation, after a series of unpleasant hormone injections.
Far inofe convenient to find a way to keep immature eggs alive
inside a woman's body-which is exactly what Tilly and his team
are working towards. First they examined niece genetically engineered
so they couldn't make a protein called Bax, which plays a key
role in cell suicide. They found that young adult Bax-less females
had three times as many eggs as normal, but could still produce
pups-proof that blocking cell suicide improves egg survival and
doesn't affect mouse fertility.

Two-year-old females-who'd be entitled to a telegram from the
Queen if they were human-had a little more trouble making pups,
but only because their bodies were too clapped out to carry a
pfegnancy. Eggs from the old Bax-less mice still formed normal
eiiibfyos when fertilised in a test tube.

Artificial wombs are unlikely ever to be an option (see "A
bun in the husband, p 42), so that raises the question of how
far into her dotage a woman could safely carry a pregnancy. No
one knows for sure, but with the help of reproductive technology
several women have given birth in their 60s. Many obstetricians
suspect that the ability to carry a baby safely has more to do
with a woman's overall fitness and health than her chronological
age.

Good egg

Of course, tinkering with a women's genes to ward off the menopause
is pie in the sky, but Tilly's team is also working on a drug
that will block cell suicide. Young women undergoing treatment
for cancers like leukaemia atid lymphoma urgently need this kind
of research. Cheinotherapy and radiation mean that over 80 per
cent of them go through an early menopause, sometimes while still
in their twenties.

One way cancer therapy seems to work is by triggering the cascade
of signals that instruct a cell to commit suicide-the immature
egg cells simply get caught in the crossfire. Reasoning that there's
absolutely no point in keeping damaged eggs hanging on by a thread-especially
if they are to form the next generation, Tilly's team has found
a way of blocking the very earliest stages of egg suicide. "We
want to have a population of good oocytes, not the Night of the
Living Dead oocytes," he says.

'To do this, they tried a drug called sphingosineI -phosphate
(S I P), which has already been shown to halt cell suicide in
human white blood cells. When Tilly's team injected the drug directly
into the ovaries of mice and treated them with radiotherapy, the
mice's immature eggs survived intact. They even went oh to form
normal embryos in the test tube, and the pregnancy rate of irradiated
mice treated with SlP was double that of the mice that didn't
get the drug. "It's taken us 10 years to get to this point
in mice, so it's going to take a while," says Tilly. "[But]
the technology could be useful for giving women an additional
four or five years of fertile lifespan." Another way to keep
the biological clock ticking would be to stop eggs maturing in
the first place, allowing them to remain in ovarian storage until
women were ready to use them. "When you found a partner you
wanted to have children with, you could concentrate all your reproductive
[resources] at that time," says Trounson.

One factor that plays a role is antiMullerian hormone, or AMH.
In mice, AMH is made by granulosa cells in the ovary, and puts
a brake on the number of eggs selected to mature (New Scientist,
I I November 2000, p 20). Axel Themmen and colleagues at Erasmus
University in Rotterdam studied mice that lacked AMH. At four
months old, the mice had three times as many growing follicles
as normal mice. By the time they were 13 months old, the mutant
mice had completely run out of eggs.

Themmen is now investigating how AMH works in humans. A drug
that enhances its effects might one day become the basis for a
new "career pill". But while research into career pills
and anti-menopausal drugs is moving at a comfortable pace, techniques
to improve pregnancy rates among women who are already running
out of eggs are being unleashed at a speed that is causing some
consternation, even in fertility circles. This is of particular
concern in countries such as the US, where there is no direct
federal government regulation of fertility treatments. 'There,
the Food and Drug Administration strictly controls the testing
of new drugs, while new medical technologies tend to be left to
individual states to regulate. All too often, that means fertility
doctors need only get consent from their patients and their clinic's
own review board before they try out new techniques. Take cytoplasmic
transfer, the highly controversial technique that creates children
that carry the genetic material of three people. Jacques Cohen
and Jason Barritt of the St Barnabas Medical Center in New jersey
attracted international criticism for their work. Among fertility
experts, the major worry is not about the few extra genes carried
in the mitochondria-the cell's powerhouses that make up a fraction
of the jelly-like cytoplasm-but about the wisdom of using the
new technique in humans without testing whether it works.

'THE EGG IS NOT JUST A QUIESCENT LITTLE BLOB, THERE'S AN INCREDIBLE
AMOUNT GOING ON'

One of the main problems older women face when trying to conceive
is that their eggs often end up with the wrong number of chromosomes,
a condition called aneuploidy. If an aneuploid egg is fertilised,
the resulting embryo either miscarries-sometimes before the pregnancy
is detected-or the child is born with a handicap such as Down's
syndrome. One theory is that the cellular machinery in the cytoplasm
that is needed to deal the right number of chromosomes into the
two halves of the dividing egg is too old to do its job properly.
That has led to the controversial notion that a shot of fresh
cytoplasm from a younger woman's egg could also help when an older
woman's eggs fail to produce babies for unknown reasons.

The trouble is, say critics like Winston and Trounson, there's
no hard evidence that the technology helps women get pregnant.
True, the women that Cohen and Barritt treated had had many failed
IVF attempts before they got pregnant following the new procedure.
And, true, their embryos looked better under a microscope than
those they produced without the procedure-but who's to say that
the same wouldn't have happened with just one more round of IVF?
To find out, you would need to run trials that compared cytoplasmic
transfer or IVF alone in women with the same history of infertility.

What's more, the few experiments testing similar techniques
in animals have been contradictory. Even worse, the cytoplasm
contains substances that are vital to the normal development of
the embryo, so there's even a slim chance that cytoplasmic transfer
may threaten the long-term health of the baby. Nothing is really
known about the consequences of techniques like cytoplasmic transfer,
says Tilly, who believes patient demand and doctors' willingness
to comply with those demands is rushing new treatments into the
clinics too quickly. After all, one in six couples have fertility
problems and for them the treadmill of fertility treatments can
seem like their only option (see "Right to choose",
page 41) "Patients are driving a whole load of technologies
that haven't been validated," he says.

In fact, the babies born after cytoplasmic transfer are all
reportedly doing fine. But two of the 17 fetuses created by Cohen
and Barritt had a chromosomal abnormality that causes a disorder
called Turner syndrome and did not survive, although no one can
say whether the technique is to blame.

Eggbert the mouse

What we do know is that animal experiments that involve manipulating
eggs paint a disturbing picture. Take Eggbert the mouse, the only
mammal created so far from an egg grown mainly in a lab-a feat
that fertility doctors would dearly like to repeat with human
eggs to reduce the need for egg donors , and slash the costs of
IVF.

At birth Eggbert appeared normal enough, and even went on to
father a few pups. But at six months, disaster struck. Eggbert
became obese, developed neurological problems and eventually died.
A post-mortem revealed that Eggbert suffered from some of the
same defects that plague cloned animals (New Scientist, 19 May,
p 14). "That's why we are so concerned. People should be
very, very careful," says John Eppig, a reproductive biologist
at The Jackson Laboratory in Maine who led the team that created
Eggbert. "Simply having a baby's footprints at birth doesn't
[necessarily] mean success."

Of course, the egg that became Eggbert was manipulated in a
different way from the human eggs undergoing cytoplasmic transfer,
but it illustrates a point. The egg 'is not just a quiescent little
blob", says Kate Hardy, a reproductive biologist at Imperial
College, London. "There's an incredible amount going on,"
most of which fertility researchers are only just beginning to
understand.

Still not everyone is so quick to condemn the aggressive approach
some infertility clinics take. "You'll hear that there's
no regulation in the States-and that's not an accurate statement
at all," says Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society
for Reproductive Medicine. 'What we don't regulate is people's
reproductive choices." (The St Barnabas clinic wouldn't let
Barritt talk to Ne,w Scientist, but sent a written statement saying
that its research complied with the hospital's "stringent
medical guidelines".) What's more, points out Tipton, similar
criticisms were once levelled at IVF, an innovation that society
now embraces. 'We don't know for a certain fact that every human
being conceived through an IVF process is not going to drop dead
at the age of 30. We don't know that because the first IVF baby
is not that old yet. But there is certainly nothing to indicate
that that's going to be a problem. If you insist on that sort
of long-term outcome, you're never going to get anywhere."

But while fertility researchers struggle to balance the demands
of science and their patients, one thing is clear: the number
of patients is only going to grow. Women are delaying childbirth
like never before-the average age for having a first child in
Britain is now nearly 30-and without medical intervention a portion
of those women are destined to swell the ranks of the infertile.
Bridget Jones aside, the need for a safe way to slow down the
biological clock has never been more urgent. F7

FOCUS Next week a row is set to erupt that will rock the staid
world of anthropology. Just what did happen to the Yanomami tribe?

THIRTY-TWO years ago, two American researchers carried thousands
of doses of measles vaccine through the Amazonian rainforest to
study the remote Yanomami people. This much of the story everyone
can agree on. But whether this scientific duo were medical heroes
or imperialistic villains is the basis of a fierce row that is
brewing in the scientific community-and threatens to destroy anthropology's
good name. In a book to be published in the US next week called
Darkness in El Dorado: How scientists and journalists devastated
the Amazon author Patrick Tiemey presents the case @at anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon of the University of Califomia, Santa Barbara,
and the geneticist James Neel of the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor, who died this year, helped place "one of the Amazon
basin's oldest tribes on the cusp of extinction", as the
publisher's blurb puts it. The most sensational of the allegations
is that Neel's use of measles vaccine unleashed a lethal epidemic
among the Yanomami people that killed up to one in five of those
who became infected. As rumours of the book's contents have

leaked out, many have rushed to defend the accused. The debate
is likely to get even more heated next week at the American Anthropological
Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, where the two sides
will meet in a special forum. T'he way the hostilities have broken
out before the book has even been published might make an interesting
study for future anthropologists of the information age. In early
September, two reviewers of the book, anthropologists Terry Turner
of Comell University in New York and Leslie Sponsel of the University
of Hawaii at Manoa, sent a confidential e-mail to Louise Lamphere
and Don Brenneis, the president and president-elect respectively
of the American Anthropological Association. It wamed them of
the book's allegations and the unwelcome publicity it would bring
to their profession. 'It was dynamith, it was a bomb and we knew
it would cause a commotion," says Turner. Many of the allegations,
they warned, would become public in October when an excerpt was
scheduled for publication in The New Yorker magazine. Two weeks
after the reviewers sent

their supposedly private e-mail, it was still zipping back
and forth through cyberspace, and people with even remote connections
to anthropology were getting copies forwarded to them. "I
received four in one day from different comers of the world,"
says Susan Lindee, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia. Turner and Sponsel say they don't know who leaked
their message. As New Scientist went to press, crucial parts of
the book appear to have been toned down in the version that wfll
appear in the shops next week, compared with the proofs sent to
reviewers. Chagnon says: "Tierney puts the most negative
twist on virtually everything I did to the point of...implying
motives I didn't have." Chagnon and Neel have attracted publicity
before, but often of a more positive kind. Chagnon began his study
of the then obscure Yanomami people in 1964, when he was still
a graduate student. In his 1968 book Yanomamd: The fierce people,
he depicts a culture where violence, hostility and even killing
help enhance social status, challenging widely held notions of
the natural peacefulness of humans. The book led to films by Chagnon
and others and sold more than a millioncopies, becoming a

standard text for anthropology students. In 1968, Chagnon teamed
up with Neel, who was already an eminent geneticist and doctor.
When Neel died in February this year, Francis Collins of the US
National Human Genome Research Institute said he was a pioneer
who had "birthed the field of human genetics". Among
his other distinctions, Neel had been in charge of the Atomic
Bomb Casualty Commission, which among other things studied how
the Japanese victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been affected
by exposure to radiation. For him, the Yanomami were a perfect
control population, whose isolation guaranteed they had never
been exposed to anything but background radiation. In addition,
he wanted to observe their immunological response to a vaccine.
The way in which the Yanomami's immune systems reacted to the
weakened form of nwasles virus might also have given them valuable
information about why measles proved so'deadly to isolated peoples.
But when Chagnon and Neel arrived in the Amazon, they reported
finding a measles epidemic already gathering momenttfm, possibly
originating from other outside contacts. Tierney argues that the
extreme isolation of the Yanomami would have made this unlikely
In the final version of the book, Tiemey accuses Neel of recklessly
selecting a vaccine that posed a higher risk of measles compared
with other vaccines in order to test his theories that those higher
up the social scale would be better at fighting disease. For his
tests, Neel chose to use the Edmonston B measles vaccine, which
contained a live, weakened form of the virus. Tierney argues that
Edmonston B was a strangely dangerous choice, given that weaker
strains of the vaccine were available and that most Yanomami had
never been exposed to measles and were chronically sick and malnourished.
Neel's defenders say Tierney's claims are wrong. The University
of Michigan, in an extensive statement, calls the book the "literary
equivalent of a professional 'hit'". It claims that Tiemey's
book is the result of a long-standing professional vendetta by
Chagnon's critics. They dismiss as absurd any notion that the
researchers' activities created a climate of aggression in Yanomami
society, since records of their violence date back to before Chagnon's
birth. A,nd at least two of the scientists whom Tiemey quotes
as quesfioning Neel's choice of the vaccine came to Neel's defence
when contacted by New Scientist. Samuel Katz of Duke University
in Durham, North Carolina, who helped develop the Edmonston B
vaccine, says that it was approved and used on millions of children
in the US and abroad until 1975, including some Who suffered as
much from malaria and malnutrition as the Yanomami. And these
children weren't able to transmit measles. "I might have
made a different choice, but Neel's was also logical," says
Yale University epidemiologist Francis Black, whom Tierney describes
as reacting with disbelief when informed of Neel's use of Edmonston
B. "It gave stronger adverse reactions, but was a better
studied vaccine and was known to give immunity for ten years."
Neither scientist recalled talking to Tierney, although both said
they could have easily forgotten short telephone conversations.
Tierney hasn't yet responded to these volleys. His publicist says
that an agreement with his publisher prevents him from commenting
on the book before its publication. The review proofs had only
limited circulation, so most of the criticism of the book has
been centred on the content of Turner and Sponsel's leaked e-mail
and the extracts published in The New Yorker. Sponsel says the
full scale of Tiemey's charges isn't yet understood. "So
far, 95 per cent of the fight has been over the vaccine,"
says Sponsel. "But 95 per cent of the book is about other
things." Both sides in the controversy agree that its implications
extend beyond personal animosities. Critics of the book say it
may make indigenous peoples suspicious of medical help and impede
vaccination efforts around the world. Others say that if any of
the allegations are true, then reparations should be paid to the
Yanomami. Chagnon is considering legal action. With the publication
of the book and the lifting of the gag on Tierney, a fuller analysis
can begin. Whether or not his allegations are confirmed, they
may inflict permanent damage on anthropology. Alternatively, they
might help the science of anthropology to emerge all the stronger,
with stricter ethical standards in place. The future of an entire
field of study will be affected. Philip Cohen

AS THE Earth gets hotter, its biosphere may accelerate rather
than slow global warming, climate modellers have found. Peter
Cox and his colleagues at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction
and Research at Bracknell have created the first climate model
that includes constant interaction between vegetation, the atmosphere
and the oceans. Trees, grass and shrubs are allowed to grow, die
and breathe at rates that depend on envirom-nental factors, including
temperature and atmospheric-CO, levels. The results are fed back
into the simulation. Plants generally absorb more C02 as more
is pumped into the atmosphere. But as it gets hotter, the amount
absorbed by plants levels out, while the amount produced by microorganisms
in the soil increases exponentially. This means that the biosphere
has an overall warming effect as temperatures climb.

Drying and warming will also tum large areas of the Amazon
rainforest into grassland, predicts Cox, further accelerating
the effect (New Scientist, 6 May, p 7). The results from Cox's
model are alarming. By 2050, he says, the biosphere will rapidly
switch ftom sucking up a little C02 to belching out a lot. As
a result, temperatures over land could increase by as much as
6' C, instead of the 40 predicted by other models. Those numbers
show the vital role of the biosphere, says Cox. "Their model
is pretty extreme," says Ian Woodward of the University of
Sheffield, who cautions that other models don't show such a large
dieback in the Amazon. "But," he says, "what they've
got now is the best way forward." Nicola Jones

More at: Nature (9 November, p 184)

While the rich stay rich, the poor get hotter

THE Silk Road to Samarkand is hot and dusty-and the devastating
droughts and searing heat of this part of central Asia are almost
certain to get worse. In a blistering new analysis of global warming's
winners and losers, climate scientists warn that temperatures
in the region, which now regularly exceed 40 OC, are due for some
of the biggest increases in the coming century. The study, from
the newly founded Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at
the University of East Anglia in Norwich, predicts that some countries
will warm up more than twice as much as others during the coming
century. As negotiators from more than 160 countries gather in
The Hague this weekend to plan ways of curbing emissions of greenhouse
gases, many will for the first time be armed with a detailed prediction
of how their country will fare if nothing is done. The study predicts
more than 5 'C of warming for a string of Asian countries, from
Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia, that are already among the hottest
and driest in the world. Several, including Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Afghanistan and Iran, have suffered famine this year. They are
followed by other drought-ridden countries in West Africa. Mike
Hulme, director of the centre, says: "What is critical about
our report is that for the first time it shows individual countries
how much warming to expect and how the burden of climate change
will be distributed across the world." In line with previous
predictions, the study confirms that the biggest temperature rises
are likely to be in Russia and Canada, whose large Arctic territories
are expected to be more ttian 6 OC warmer by the end of the 21st
century. Some countries can look forward to global warming with
more equanimity, at least as far as temperatures are concemed.
The six nations set for the least warming, at around 3 'C or less,
are Ireland and Britain in the northern hemisphere, and New Zealand,
Chile, Uruguay and Argentina in the south. Hulme's study divided
national wealth by the predicted temperature rise to assess the
likely impact of warming on each country's population. The four
most vulnerable countries by this measure are Afghanistan, Ethiopia,
Sierra Leone and Tanzania. Each has only $100 of its GDP per inhabitant
to cope with every degree of warming. The least vulnerable country
is Luxembourg, with $8800 per capita for each degree of warming.
Almost without exception, the nations that are most threatened
by global warming produce the smallest amounts of greenhouse gases,
says Hulme. But another leading climate scientist from the University
of East Anglia questions Hulme's analysis. Developing nations
need not be passive victims, says Nhck Kelly of the university's
Climatic Research Unit. Many poor developing countries 'have developed
a considerable capacity to cope and adapt" to climate threats
such as floods and drought, he says. "It could be argued
that the heavy dependence of the industrialised nations on technology
untested against envirorunental trends means these nations are
among the most susceptible to climate change." Fred Pearce

More at: wwwtyndall.uea.ac.uk

Your country needs you
Were 30,000 soldiers duped into testing deadly chemical weapons?

BRITAIN'S Ministry of Defence should allow an immediate study
of the health risks facing survivors of chemical weapons tests
it carried out until 1989, sak politicians and scientists. The
demands follow the publication this week of Gassed, a book claiming
that Britain deliberately exposed up to 30,000 servicemen to poison
gases in the world's longestrunning programme of chemical warfare
experiments. As New Scientist went to press Wiltshire police refused
to confirm or deny reports that 40 deaths were now under investigation
as a result of the tests. T'he author, joumahst Rob Evans, claims
that many of the tests done secretly during the cold war broke
the Nuremberg code of ethics, introduced in 1947 to avoid a repeat
of the horrific experiments conducted in Nazi concentrafion camps
during the Second World War. A spokeswoman for Porton Down says:
"The actions were consistent with the standards of the day."
She adds that 20,000 servicemen were exposed, not 30,000. B@t
one leading expert on chemical warfare, chemical pathologist Alastair
Hay of Leeds University, says nerve gas tests done at Porton Down
"were ethically questionable and scientifically flawed because
they failed to properly assess the risk. These experiments on
servicemen failed to properly assess the risks. There is a huge
question mark over whether their consent was really informed.
You wouldn't get away with it today. " He says there should
be a large-scale investigation into the health of survivors. Ian
Gibson, a Labour MP on the House of Commons Select Committee on
Science and Technology, backs Hay in calling for an investigation
into the health effects and ethics of the experiments. 'I think
people were conned into the tests," he says. Gibson wants
MPs to visit Porton Down as soon as possible to quiz scientists
there, and will raise the issue in the House of Commons this week.
"It would be no surprise if people were suffering long-term
health effects," he told New Scientist. "Porton Down
needs independent scrutiny." The book is based on over 100
interviews with those who took part in and ran the experiments
at the Porton Down chemical warfare research centre in Wiltshire,
as well as dozens of previously confidential official reports.
Evans cites government documents that show young soldiers were
exposed to sub-lethal doses of mustard gas, nerve gas, tear gas
and mind-bending drugs like LSD in numerous experiments at Porton
Down. The aim was to find out about the toxicity of the gases,
and many servicemen suffered illnesses as a result. In the early
1950s, the liquid nerve gases sarin, soman and GF were dripped
on to the skin or clothes of 396 men. The experiment went disastrously
wrong. Five men were admitted to hospital, one had to be revived
after suffering respiratory failure, and one died. The death of
20-year-old airman Ronald Maddison is the subject of a murder
investigation launched in August 1999 by Wiltshire police. Hay
suggests a health survey should look for links with respiratory
diseases and tumours. Men whose skin was exposed to mustard gas
should be investigated for skin cancers. Those who took part in
the nerve gas experiments risk damage to the nervous system, Hay
says. This could include heart and muscular problems, as well
as mood swings and depression. Britain is not alone in having
conducted large-scale chemical weapons tests on people. But its
73-year testing programme was exceptionally large. In the US,
only 15,000 people participated in chemical warfare experiments,
and they were stopped after a public outcry in 1975. Tests on
2000 people were carried out in both Canada and Australia. Australia
has awarded pensions to servicemen who took part in mustard gas
experiments and then suffered serious illness. The volunteers
at Porton Down have not received any such compensation. Rex Watson,
a former director of Porton Down, has defended the experiments
as ethical, given the threat that was posed by the Soviet Union
during the cold war. Like many of his scienfific colleagues, he
put himself forw;ird for tests alongside volunteers from the services.
Rob Edwards

Eggs may live longer

DUTCH researchers have identified a hormone that may influence
how quickly mammals use up their lifetime's supply of eggs. The
hormone might one day be used to delay menopause to prevent conditions
such as osteoporosis, or to extend a woman's fertile life. Axel
Themmen and his colleagues at Erasmus University in Rotterdam
were studying mice when they found that the substance, called
anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH), puts the brakes on the early stages
of follicle development. At one week old, baby mice have thousands
of primordial follicles that are capable of developing into eggs.
Over a mouse's lifetime, most of those follicles will start to
develop. But whereas a few will go all the way and become mature
eggs, the vast majority will die off before reaching that stage.
AMH is best known for its role in male embryo development, but
is also made by the granulosa cells that surround the growing
follicles. This suggests that AMH helps keep the number of developing
follicles at a constant level, says Themmen. At four months old,
mice that lacked AMH had 3 times the number of growing follicles
and fewer primordial follicles than normal mice, Themmen told
the llth International Congress of Endocrinology in Sydney last
week. But the mice that lacked the AMH brake used up their eggs
quicker. Because there were no primordial follicles left in 13-month-old
mice, says Themmen, there were no small growing follicles. If
AMH inhibits the development of follicles in humans in the same
way, it may be possible to use it as a drug to delay the menopause,
says Ray Rodgers, a reproductive endocrinologist at Flinders University
in Adelaide. "If we could make the reservoir of primordial
follicles last until the end of a woman's life, we may be able
to prevent menopause, and the osteoporosis and cardiovascular
changes that follow," he says. MWbiting the follicle development
could even help extend a woman's reproductive life by preventing
eggs being used up dunng periods when she doesn't want to conceive,
Rodgers speculates. Rachel Nowak, Melboume

PRIME TIME Fame and
fortune await the person who cracks the greatest problem in mathematics.
And that could be any day now, says Erica Klarroich

WHEN G. H. Hardy faced a stormy sea passage from Scandinavia
to England, he took out an unusual insurance policy. Hardy scribbled
a postcard to a friend with the words: "Have proved the Riemann
hypothesis". God, Hardy reasoned, would not let him die in
a shipwreck, because he would then be feted for solving the most
famous problem in mathematics. He survived the trip. Almost a
century later, the Riemann hypothesis is still unsolved. Its glamour
is unequalled because it holds the key to the primes, those mysterious
numbers that underpin so much of mathematics. And now whoever
cracks it will find not only glory in posterity, but a tidy reward
in this life: a $1 million prize announced this April by the Clay
Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Th6re are signs
that the great prize might soon be claimed, and the most promising
approaches come not from pure mathematics, but from physics. Researchers
have discovered a deep connection between the Riemann hypothesis

and the physical world-a connection that could not only prove
the hypothesis, but also tell us something profound about the
behaviour of atoms, molecules and even concert halls. One mathematician
has followed this lead into a very strange place, seeking a solution
in an intricately twisted space with infinitely many dimensions.
Yet the primes seem simple enough at first glance. They are those
numbers, like 2, 3, 5 and 7, that are only divisible by 1 and
themselves, although 1 isn't included among them. Primes are the
atoms of the number system, because every other number can be
built by multiplying primes together. Unfortunately there is no
periodic table for the primes-they are maddeningly unpredictable,
and finding new primes is mostly a matter of trial and error.
In the 19th century, mathematicians found a little order ib this
apparent chaos. Even though individual primes pop up unexpectedly,
their distribution follows a trend. It's like tossing a coin.
The result is unpredictable, but after many coin tosses we expect
roughly half heads and half tails. The primes get rarer as you
look at larger and larger numbers (see Diagram, p 36), and mathematicians
found that this thinning out is predictable. Below a given number
X, the proportion of primes is about 1 lln(x), where ln(x) is
the natural logarithm of x. So, for example, about 4 per cent
of numbers smaller than ten billion are prime. So far so good.
But that "about' is very vague. Numbers are products of pure
logic, and so surely they ought to behave in a precise, regular
way. Mathematicians would at least like to know how far the prime
numbers stray from the distribution. Georg Riemann found a vital
clue. In 1859, he discovered that the secrets of the primes are
locked inside something called the zeta function. The zeta function
is simply a particular way of turning one number into another
number, like the function "multiply by 5". Riemann decided
to see what would happen if he fed the zeta function complex numbersnumbers
made from a real part (an ordinary number) and a so-called imaginary
part (a multiple of i, the square root of -1). Complex numbers
can be visualised as arrayed on the complex plane, with real numbers
on the horizontal axis and imaginary numbers on the vertical axis.

Riemann found that certain complex numbers, when plugged into
the zeta function, produce the result zero. The few zeros he could
calculate lay on a vertical line in the complex plane, and he
guessed that, except for a few well-understood cases, all the
infinity of zeros should lie exactly on this line. What does this
have to do with the primes? If you plot how many primes exist
below a given number (see Diagram, p 36), what you get is a smooth
curve with small wiggles added-that is, the 1/ln(x) rule, plus
deviations. According to Michael Berry of Bristol University,
you can think of that pattem of deviations as a wave. just like
a sound wave, it is made up of many frequencies. "And what
are the frequencies?" asks Berry. "They're the Riemann
zeros. The zeros are harmonies in the music of the primes.Berry
isn't speaking in metaphors. 'I've tried to play this music by
putting a few thousand primes into my computer," he says
"but it's just a horrible cacophony. You'd actually need
billions or trfllionssomeone with a more powerful machine should
do it." Riemann worked out that if the zeros really do lie
on the critical line, then the primes stray from the 1 lln(x)
distribution exactly as much as a bunch of coin tosses stray from
the 50:50 distribution law. This is a startling conclusion. The
pri-Tnes aren't just unpredictable, they really do behave as if
each prime number is picked at random, with the probability I
/in(x)-ahnost as if they were chosen with a weighted coin. So
to some extent the primes are tamed, because we can make statistical
predictions about them, just as we can about coin tosses. But
only if Riemann's guess was right. If the zeros don't line up,
then the prime numbers are much more unruly. As Enrico Bombieri
of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton writes on the
Clay Institute website (wwwclay math.org/prize-problems/riemann.htm):
"The failure of the Riemann hypothesis would create havoc
in the distribution of prime numbers." And the havoc would
spread further. Hundreds of results in number theory begin, "If
the Riemann hypotht-sis is true, then. . ." This is why mathematicians
long to prove the hypothesis. But how do you prove something about
an infinity of numbers? Researchers have used supercomputers to
calculate the first 1,500,000,001 zeros above the x-axis, and
millions of other zeros higher up, and so far all of them lie
on the critical line. If just one of them did not, the Riemann
hypothesis would be killed. This is heartening, but no amount
of computer hacking can prove the hypothesis. There are always
more zeros to check. And, cautions Andrew Odlyzko of AT&T
Labs, who has spearheaded the effort to calculate zeros, "number
theory has many examples of conjectures that are plausible, are
supported by seemingly overwhelming numerical evidence, and yet
are false." Some deeper insight is needed. Early in the 20th
century, mathematicians made a daring conjecture: that the Riemann
zeros could correspond to the energy levels of a quantum mechanical
system. Quantum mechanics deals with the behaviour of tiny particles
such as electrons. Crucially, its equations work with complex
numbers, but the energy of a physical system is always measured
by a real number. So energy levels form an infinite set of numbers
lying along the real axis of the complex plane-a straight line.
This sounds like Riemann's zeros. The line of zeros is vertical,
rather than horizontal, but it is a simple bit of maths to rotate
it and put it on top of the real hne. If the zeros then match
up with the energy levels of a quantum system, the Riemann hypothesis
is proved. For decades, this ide@ was only wishful thinking. Then
in 1972 came a hint that it could work. Hugh Montgomery, at the
University of Michigan, had found a formula for the spacings between
Riemann zeros. Visiting the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
he ran into physicist Freeman Dyson at aftemoon tea, and mentioned
his formula. Dyson recognised it immediately. It was identical
to a formula that gives the spacings between energy levels in
a category of quantum systems-quantum chaotic systems, to be precise.
Chaos theory applies to physical systems so sensitive to their
starting conditions that they are impossible to predict. In the
Earth's chaotic atmosphere, for example, the tiny draught caused
by the flap of a butterfly's wings can eventually lead to a tremendous
storm. Almost all complicated systems are chaotic. The quantum
versions of these systems have a jumble of energy levels, scattered
apparently at random but in fact spaced according to Montgomery's
formula. Quantum chaotic systems include atoms bigger than hydrogen,
large atomic nuclei, all molecules, and electrons trapped in the
microscopic arenas called quantum dots. Could the Riemann zeros
fit one of these quantum chaofic systems? In the late 1980s, Odlyzko
picked an assortment of systems, and compared their energy levels
with the Riemann zeros. In a discovery that electrified mathematicians
and physicists, Odlyzko found that when he averaged out over many
different chaotic systems, the energy level spacings fitted the
Riemann spacings with stunning precision. That's still not enough.
To prove the Riemann hypothesis, researchers must pinpoint a specific
quantum system whose energy levels correspond exactly to the zeros,
and prove that they do so all the way to infinity. Which, of all
the different systems, is the right one? Berry and his colleague
Jonathan Keating have made one suggestion. In a chaotic system,
an object usually moves unpredictably, but sometimes its path
will cycle back on itself in a "periodic orbit". Berry
and Keating think that the right quantum system will have an infinite
collection of periodic orbits, one for each prime number. And
last year, Nicholas Katz and Peter Samak predicted that the system
should have a special kind of symmetry called symplectic syrrunetry.
Both of these clues should help quantum chaologists zero in on
the one system that will prove the Riemann hypothesis. "I
have a feeling that the hypothesis will be cracked in the next
few years," says Berry. "l see the strands coming together.
Someone will soon get the million dollars." The winner could
well be Alain Connes, a mathematician based at the Institute of
Advanced Scientific Study in Bures-surYvette, France. Connes has
a startlingly direct approach to the problem: create a system
that already includes the prime numbers. To understand how, you
have to imagine a quantum system not as a particle bouncing around
an atom, say, but as a geometrical space. It sounds odd, but it
represents one of the weird things about quantum systems: they
can be two or more things at once. Like Schr6dinger's cat, which
is a peculiar mixture of dead and alive, any quantum object can
find itself in a .superposition" of different states. To
characterise this messy existence, physicists use what they call
a state space. For each kind of possibility (say "alive"
and 'dead"), you draw a new axis and add a dimension to the
space. If there are just two possible states, as is the case for
Schr6dinger's cat, the space is two dimensional, with three states
it is three dimensional, and so on. Then in the Schrbdinger's
cat space, you would mark a cross one unit along the x-axis to
represent a fully alive cat. Similarly, a stone dead cat would
be one unit up the y-axis, and a part-alive, partdead cat would
appear @omewhere along an arc between these points. The 'shape"
of the space affects how the state moves around in it, and therefore
how the system works, including the way its energy levels are
arrayed. This depends not just on the number of dimensions, but
also on the geometry of how they are stuck together. Connes decided
to build a quantum state space out of the prime numbers. Of course,
the primes are a bunch of isolated numbers, nothing hke the smooth
expanses of space in which we can measure @gs like angles and
lengths. But mathematicians have invented some bizarrely twisted
geometries that are based on the primes.

'Right now, when we tackle problems without knowing the truth
of the Riemann hypothesis, it's as if we have a screwdriver. But
when we have it, it'll be more like a bulldozer'

In "5-adic" geometry, for example, numbers far apart
(in the ordinary way) are pulled close together if they differ
by 5, or 15, or 250-any multiple of 5. In the same way, 2-adic
geometry pulls together all the even numbers. To put all the primes
in the mix, Connes constructed an infinite-dimensional space called
the Adeles. In the first dimension, measurements are made with
2-adic geometry, in the second dimension with 3-adic geometry,
in the third dimension with 5-adic geometry, and so on, to include
all the prime numbers. Last year Connes proved that his primebased
quantum system has energy levels corresponding to all the Riemann
zeros that lie on the critical line. He will win the fame and
the million-dollar prize if he can make one last step: prove that
there aren't any extra zeros hanging around, unaccounted for by
his energy levels. That last step is a formidable one. Has Connes
simply replaced the Riemann hypothesis with an equally difficult
question? Some experts advise caution. "I still think that
some major new idea is needed here," says Bombieri. Berry,
for his part, doesn't flinch at the mathematical peculiarity of
Connes's system. "I'm absolutely sure that if he's right,
someone will find a clever way to make it in the lab. Then you'll
get the Riemann zeros out just by observing its spectrum."
Berry and Keating are now turning around this connection with
physics, using mathematics based on the Riemann zeta function
to predict the behaviour of chaotic systems. Most models of quantum
chaos are complicated and difficult to calculate. The Riemann
zeros, by comparison, are easy to compute. "We always test
our formulae on the Riemann zeta function to see if they work,"
says Keating. If Connes or one of the physicists proves the Riemann
hypothesis using a quantum system, the link will be firmly established.
Then, Berry predicts, the field will blossom. Using the mathematics
of the zeta funcfion, scientists will be able to predict the scattering
of very high energy levels in atoms, molecules and nuclei, and
the fluctuations in the resistance of quantum dots in a magnetic
field. And it turns out that the same mathematics applies to any
situation wher@ waves bounce around chaotically, including light
waves and sound. So the performance of microwave cavities and
fibre optics could be improved, and the acoustics of real concert
halls might profit from the music of the primes. Even so, it is
mathematics that will gain the most. 'Right now, when we tackle
problems without knowing the truth of the Riemann hypothesis,
it's as if we have a screwdriver," says Samak. "But
when we have it, it'll be more like a bulldozer." For example,
it should lead to an efficient way of deciding whether a given
large number is prime. No existing algorithms designed to do this
are guaranteed to terminate in a finite number of steps. Proving
the Riemann hypothesis won't be the end of the story. It will
prompt a sequence of even harder, more penetrating questions.
Why do the primes achieve such a delicate balance between randomness
and order? And if their pattems do encode the behaviour of quantum
chaotic systems, what other jewels will we uncover when we dig
deeper? Those who believe that mathematics holds the key to the
Universe might do well to ponder a quesfion that goes back to
the ancients: What secrets are locked within the primes? Fl

Erica Klarroich is a mathematician and science writer based
in Santa Cruz, Califomia

Further reading:www.utm.edu/research/primes www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/pdme-chaos.htmi